GoFr is an opinionated Go framework for building microservices, aimed at Go developers and platform teams who want HTTP, gRPC, data access and observability built in rather than assembled from separate libraries.

What it is

GoFr is an opinionated microservice development framework written in Go, distributed as the module gofr.dev/pkg/gofr and licensed under Apache-2.0. It is listed in the CNCF Landscape. The project's stated goal is to simplify microservice development with a focus on Kubernetes deployment and out-of-the-box observability, and while it can build generic applications, microservices remain at its core. A minimal program creates an application with app := gofr.New(), registers a handler with app.GET("/greet", ...), and calls app.Run(), which serves on localhost:8000.

The concrete problem it solves is the assembly work that precedes a first line of business logic in a Go service. Instead of wiring an HTTP router, a gRPC server, a configuration loader, middleware, structured logging, metrics, tracing, a publisher/subscriber client and datasource health checks by hand from separate libraries, a GoFr service gets those as part of the framework and follows REST standards by default. It also removes the gap between development and operation: datasource health checks, database migrations, cron jobs and log-level changes are framework concerns rather than per-service infrastructure code.

Key capabilities

• Simple API syntax through gofr.dev/pkg/gofr, with gofr.New() for application construction and app.Run() for serving.
• Out-of-the-box observability covering logs, traces and metrics.
• gRPC support alongside the HTTP service, which includes circuit breaker support.
• Authentication middleware and custom middleware support.
• Publish/subscribe messaging, cron jobs, and WebSocket handling.
• Health checks for all datasources, plus database migration handling.
• Swagger rendering, abstracted file systems, and support for changing the log level without restarting the service.

Who uses it and how

• Teams building microservices for Kubernetes, the deployment target the framework explicitly designs for.
• Service owners who need REST conventions, middleware and datasource health checks present from the first commit rather than retrofitted.
• Developers who want tracing, metrics and logs available without adding separate instrumentation libraries per service.
• Backend teams that need both HTTP and gRPC endpoints over the same application object and shared middleware.
• Contributors and evaluators arriving through the project's presence in the CNCF Landscape and its hacktoberfest topic; ready-to-run samples live in the repository's examples directory.

Getting started

Add the import gofr.dev/pkg/gofr and let Go module support fetch dependencies, or run go get -u gofr.dev/pkg/gofr. GoFr requires Go version 1.26 or above, and an application starts with go run main.go, serving on localhost:8000.

How it compares

The supplied facts name no paid products that GoFr replaces and no competing frameworks, so on the evidence here it stands alone in this registry rather than being positioned against a specific alternative. Any comparison against other Go microservice frameworks would have to come from outside these facts.

When to use it — and when not to

GoFr suits teams that accept an opinionated framework and want observability, middleware, migrations and health checks to arrive with the application rather than be chosen piece by piece. Teams that want a minimal router and full control over every dependency, or projects pinned to a Go toolchain older than 1.26, should look elsewhere. The README is largely a feature index that links out to gofr.dev for procedural detail, so self-hosters must be willing to run their own datasources and read the external documentation rather than rely on the repository alone.

import "gofr.dev/pkg/gofr"

go get -u gofr.dev/pkg/gofr

package main

import "gofr.dev/pkg/gofr"

func main() {
	app := gofr.New()

	app.GET("/greet", func(ctx *gofr.Context) (any, error) {
		return "Hello World!", nil
	})

	app.Run() // listens and serves on localhost:8000
}

$ go run main.go

git clone https://github.com/gofr-dev/gofr.git

git clone [email protected]:gofr-dev/gofr.git